Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Today's closing prices for a barrel of oil and an ounce of gold were $42.62 $44.60 and $880.80, respectively, making Dorcus' Daddy the winner of the fifth "Guess the Price of Oil and Gold" contest by a wide small margin over News and Mathlete.[Note: The scale in the chart above paints a misleading picture of the final results tabulated below. The maximum value of the vertical scale is about five times the minimum value, whereas, in the horizontal direction it is just over twice the minimum value - vertical separation, in percentage terms, is much greater than it appears.]

While, in the end it was a fairly close contest (thanks to the surge in the price of oil today), this was, by far, the largest error on the part of the winner. In previous contests, the combined percentage differences between the guessed and actual values for oil and gold were just a few percentage points - this time around it was over 30.Dorcus' Daddy wins a one-year subscription to Iacono Research, where the model portfolio ended the year with a loss of just 27 percent (just?) after a rousing last few weeks of the year.

This follows consecutive annual gains of 22 percent, 25 percent, and 24 percent putting the model portfolio value back to about early-2006 after a very challenging 2008.

Thanks to all who participated - there will be a mid-year contest next year which should kick off sometime in early-April.

Congratulations DD - please send me mail so I can get an account set up for you.

-------------------------------------------

UPDATE: December 31st, 2008, 3:50 PM PST

As pointed out by News in the comments, the Nymex close for crude oil was indeed $44.60 a barrel per the Nymex website and both the chart and the table have been updated to reflect this, but it does not affect first place result (I don't know why Bloomberg, INO, Kitco, and others are reporting a close of $42.62 - well, now Bloomberg appears to have updated theirs to $44.60 as well).